Timothy Miller's Blog, page 6

Night Owls

Nighthawks at the Diner

  Why are so many writers night owls? Is it the peace and quiet, the hush when all the world's asleep? Or the insomnia that arises from trying to resolve insoluble plot problems? Well, I can only speak for myself, and my memories are a little bit hazy, but I blame my oldest brother and sister. Let me take you back. It was probably 1966, and I would have been eight or nine.

Jim, a career Army sergeant, was just back from his first tour of Vietnam and cooling his heels wa...

Review: A Noir Story

 

Noir is all about bad ideas executed badly under the influence of uncontrolled passion. Andrew Sherman understands that and has crafted a cautionary tale that veers from lighthearted to deadly serious in a heartbeat. The story starts with a cuckolded husband crafting an explosive missive to his rival with every possible opportunity for things to go wrong. Then it interrupts its regularly scheduled narrative to show us how we got to this point.

There’s a healthy dose of Quentin Tarantino in this ...

Plato's dog

      The Turing Test, first proposed concretely in 1950 by Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, supposedly tests whether a computer can think like a human being. But it doesn't measure that at all, but rather whether a computer can fool a human into believing it's another human. And the test in one form or another has been fooling unsophisticated observers ever since 1961 's ELIZA. 

     ELIZA was basically a rudimentary chatbot, and it wasn't intelligent at all. It was basically a parlo...

AI to the rescue

 I have what I think is a natural revulsion for AI shared by many who would label
themselves progressives or forward-thinkers. It's not that I fear change, but I do fear someone else breaking into the cockpit of my mind and taking over the controls, plundering six thousand years of accumulated human wisdom before I've even had a chance to finger its prettiest baubles. Wait your turn, AI!

But maybe I've been looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe, just maybe, AI will give us the extraordinary o...

Ray Bradbury

“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at
night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”--Ray Bradbury

Learning to Read

 I love reading.

There's nothing amazing about that. Most writers first started writing because they loved reading. What I do find strange is this: I have no memory of learning to read. You would think that such a monumental experience in my life would be a vivid memory. At least the aha! moment when arbitrary symbols suddenly acquired meaning would be etched in my mind.

I do remember first grade reading class with Dick and Jane--or rather, since I went to Catholic school, John and Jean. The Catho...

Review: The Sorrowful Girl

 There’s a tug of war I’m familiar with in writing historical fiction. The writer
wants to establish historical setting without overwhelming the reader with historical facts—the furniture without the bric-a-brac. And here’s where Keenan Powell excels with The Sorrowful Girl. From the very first page she makes us feel comfortable in small-town Massachusetts at the turn of the last century.

     It's a town mainly populated by poor, hard-working Irish immigrants, at a time when immigrants were hate...

Arcs and archetypes

     "Characters must have an arc. They must change; they must grow.” 

Writers hear this all the time, and it’s good advice (unless you're writing Seinfeld). But there is one type of character, often wildly popular, which breaks the rules all the time: the archetype.

Characters go on a journey commonly referred to as a character arc. The arc takes our character, usually on a dual journey, often on a journey of discovery, always on a journey of self-discovery. From Oedipus Rex to Emma to Dune, the ...

Are characters sharks?

 

I can't help it. I keep changing little things, adding little things to this manuscript, even as I present it to agents as a completed work. This is a little passage I added last night:

"How do you...how do you know you're not a character?"

"Oh, that's depressingly easy, my dear. Just look back on all those boring, meaningless moments, whole days that dragged away. Characters never experience that. They're sharks, always moving forward."

And I thought, hey, that's profound. But ... do I believe it...

Worlds end at the well

  I can't find it now. Maybe it never existed, or it was from somewhere else entirely. But I always associate the image with the Little Golden Book version of Walt Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People (from the Darby O'Gill tales by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh).

I must have been six or seven, just before I read The Wind in the Willows and was banished from the world of picture books entirely. I remember the image as the cover of the book, but it may have been a picture inside, or...